


In My Blood, and Nowhere Else

by sglottalk



Series: A Very Long Life [1]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 21:06:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7190447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sglottalk/pseuds/sglottalk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Count Vorhalas visits Aral Vorkosigan's grave to keep his memories of Aral alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In My Blood, and Nowhere Else

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Westbrook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Westbrook/pseuds/Westbrook) in the [Bujold_Ficathon_2013](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2013) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Either A) A conversation between Aral and Count Vorhalas when Aral was in the hospital after his heart attack, or B) Vorhalas reminiscing about Aral after his death. No romance please.

"Thank you very much for letting me come here to Vorkosigan Surleau," Count Vorhalas said.

"You are always welcome here," said Count Aral Alexander Vorkosigan. "You are one of the few people alive who really knew my grandfather."

To Count Vorhalas' eyes, Count Vorkosigan looked like he was only forty years old, but Count Vorhalas knew his true age.

"One of my many regrets is that I did not know him better than I did," Count Vorhalas said. "He was my brother's friend, yet I always had something better to do than to try to become friends with him as well. He was only on the edges of my social life. Then there were - my sons. And after that, it was almost always politics when I dealt with him. Feh. If I want to remember the politics, I can always look it up in the books - do you know how much time I spend being interviewed by historians?"

"A lot, I imagine," Count Vorkosigan said. "You are the oldest living person on Barrayar."

"Attaining _that_ status has never been one of my ambitions," Count Vorhalas said. "It's not just that I am the oldest, it's that every single person who I knew before the age of fifty has been dead for at least fifty years."

"My grandmother Cordelia died only ten years ago."

"I first met her when I was fifty-one years old." Count Vorhalas shook his head. Count Vorhalas took a deep breath as he looked at the grave. "Did I ever tell you about the time that my father forced your grandfather Aral and my brother Rulf into a tea-drinking contest?"

"Many times," Count Vorkosigan said.

"Right," said Count Vorhalas. "Did I ever tell you that, as a boy, I visited Bonsanklar with my family, and that sometimes Aral and his mother and his brother and sister were there too? That I mostly only talked to Aral's brother, but that I once played a game of chess with Aral at Bonsanklar?"

"No."

"That is because _I_ no longer remember. I do remember that I did visit Bonsanklar as a boy, and I even have a wisp of a memory of Aral's brother, but I don't remember Aral being there at all. Just a few months ago, I found the diary of one of my mother's old maidservants, and that is how I know."

Count Vorhalas walked over to the grave of Aral's brother, bowed, and then moved back to Aral's grave. "It is not just that all of those people are gone, it is that - for all that the Durona life extension treatments has preserved my body and my mind, my memory - it's not that my memory has gotten any worse, it just never was capable of holding things for such a damn long time. Every year, my memories of all of those people fade a little more. I am afraid that, if I stop coming to this grave, Aral - the Aral who lives in my blood, not the Aral from the history books - will disappear. His brother is almost not there at all now." 

Count Vorkosigan began to speak again. "I realize that this is the first time we've seen each other since Uncle Gregor's funeral. Goodness, it's hard to believe that he's been dead for almost a year."

"It is hard for me to believe that he lived so long," Count Vorhalas said. "At the time of his birth, it was inconceivable."

"Uncle Ivan is still alive," Count Vorkosigan said. What he did not say was that Lord Ivan Vorpatril already had advanced stage Durona Brain Disease, and that he most likely had less than ten years left to live.

The Durona life extension treatment worked very well for the first fifty years, except for the patients for whom it did not work as all, such as Count Vorkosigan's own long-dead father, Miles Vorkosigan. But after that time, it would cause the brain to slowly deteriorate. A patient could still live for a long time after the Durona Brain Disease began, but in the long run, it would become fatal. There were only two known ways to prevent Durona Brain Disease - the first, to refrain from using the Durona life extension treatment, and the second, to have the Vorhalas gene complex in one's DNA before the beginning of life extension treatment.

"My doctor tells me that the retrogenes are working perfectly," Count Vorkosigan said. "Thanks to you, life extension treatment will never give me brain disease. And you know that it's now standard procedure throughout all of the civilized worlds to put the Vorhalas gene complex into zygotes as part of the gene-cleaning process."

Count Vorhalas snorted. "I never dreamed that my greatest contribution to humanity would be _genetic_." He then spat on Aral's grave.

Count Vorkosigan's eyes bulged and his jaw dropped.

"I have the right," Count Vorhalas snapped. "Old gene scans indicate that neither my brother Rulf nor my son Evon had the genes to stop the brain rot. But my son Carl did. He could have been my companion now, if your grandfather - if your grandfather had not - even then, at his execution, I had no idea just how many years he had taken from my boy's life."

Count Vorkosigan did not know how to respond to that.

"Besides, I am sure that Aral is nauseated by the way people worship him these days. I rather think he welcomes a bit of my hate."

"You know, they will probably make a big deal about my grandfather next year," Count Vorkosigan said. "It's going to be the one hundred year anniversary of his death."

"I know," Count Vorhalas said. "That's why I would rather be here on the ninety-nine year anniversary of his death. I don't want to go to a memorial for him where almost nobody present had ever met him in life." Count Vorhalas looked up at the sky. "My doctors say that I could live over a thousand years. If that comes to pass, your grandfather will have been dead for the vast majority of my life. Incredible."

"Do you - do you not want to live so long?" Count Vorkosigan asked.

"I am Vor," Count Vorhalas said. "If it is my fate to live a bloody millennium, so be it. I will not die before my time, damn it. There are too many people who are alive in my blood, and nowhere else."


End file.
